You see, somehow this isn't an issue on other OSes. Why? Because there's an unified update mechanism that can be used by any program.
In addition, most of available software is packaged in a big repository with security support, and if you use third-party repositories, they can use the mechanism as well. On Windows, though, every program has to implement its own update -- some do, like Firefox, Thunderbird, WinAmp or Java, but the vast majority lacks it. And even those few with an auto-update function have it in an inconsistent matter, requiring user intervention as well.
So your boss was right, Bill Gates' mother does have some guilt for the intrusion into your server.
No, since Python is over an order of magnitude less bloated than C#. Being a bit slower at number crunching doesn't mean it can't be more efficient at doing other things.
If you want program X, install it. No one says you should be unable to. Any package manager used today will automatically pull all the dependencies -- Mono in this case.
What I'm opposed to, is having this especially wasteful framework in the default install.
And Mono is in no way different from Wine. Heck, it is _less_ integrated -- with binfmt_misc you can have win32.exes executed transparently, not so much with Mono -- if you look into/usr/bin/, you'll see wrappers that execute Mono on the program in question -- with an.exe extension!
Mono is nothing more than a.NET _emulator_ -- and an incomplete one, too.
Alas, Mono is still a part of the default Gnome distribution, just so they can have a note taking applet which takes 189MB memory (counting libraries used by it and no other process) and takes several seconds to start on beefy hardware while the C++ port of that very same code uses 5MB and starts near-instantly.
Even worse, there are folks pushing Banshee as the default music player so there's another dependency on Mono.
The sooner we get rid of Mono installed by default, the safer we'll be from this trap.
I'm sure your dad helped you get the autoexec.bat set up just right so it'd load your CD rom driver in and make sure high mem was available. Also, gotta make sure that the sound card starts up on the right IRQ, don't want to screw that one up.
It was an obstacle, but one that was a matter of a few single-line tricks. Now compare this to the Vista driver brouchacha that you cannot solve in any way, since neither Microsoft nor the hardware company is interesting in providing a working driver for your gear.
It can be done better, too. ZFS' cow can be done only for entire filesystems, so you need to mount the snapshot. I have an idea for cloning directory hierarchies, this can be damn more powerful.
Of course, I don't have a crack team of coders and I'm not suicidal to start something as big as a filesystem as a personal toy project -- but it's something to think of.
Texting while driving is not merely using a cellphone. Try to drive and use a fiddly little keypad at the same time. It's not merely distraction, it's attempted murder.
Here in Poland, there's large popular support for a lifetime driving ban for anyone who causes an accident while DUI. I'd support the same for idiots texting behind the wheel.
What's the point to even consider VMware if you have a range of alternatives which do the same? For those who want everything to be nice and user-friendly, there's VirtualBox. For those who want emulating other architectures, qemu. For when you don't need to pretend that it's a stand-alone system, there's Xen and vserver.
Using proprietary software may be a reasonable choice if there are no alternatives with feature parity. For VMware, this is not the case.
And pushing Tomboy means it's nothing but a ploy to get Mono distributed. Choosing a minor app that takes 189 freaking MB of memory for nothing but displaying sticky notes on the screen is preposterous when you have similar programs which do the same in a few MBs. It's waste for your high-end desktop/laptop with 2-4GB RAM, it's a deal breaker for slimmer configurations.
Mono was a trap from the very beginning. Let's not let it drag us down.
Uhm, wrong. Sun's employees have specifically said they introduced the incompatibility on purpose. So it's not a problem with Linux, but a problem with Sun.
But if you can create a crafted binary of your own, you can simply copy the app you want executed and chmod +x it. It will have the exact same capabilities as the other binary you can create. Thus, mapping ld.so doesn't give you anything and is not a vulnerability at all.
Well, an OS which can't handle upgrades without a clean install is pretty worthless. Have you tried something with a real packaging system?
I've heard that Red Hat and FreeBSD have sometimes troubles with upgrades as well, but as a long-time Debian user, I never noticed any large-scale troubles. Nothing is perfect, but issues are limited to single programs -- like, PostgreSQL failed in its upgrade from 8.1 to 8.3 on every single setup I managed so I had to do full dumps/restores. In general, system upgrades work fine -- there's a server which had potato->woody->sarge->lenny without a single breakage.
If you have total control over the computer, you can change files of another program as you wish. It is generally impossible to install an extension without the user's interaction -- unless you mess with Firefox' internal structures, which is what Microsoft here does.
A question "Blah has been installed, do you want to enable it?" would be wrong in all legitimate cases, since the user already elected to install the thing. A trojan (Windows Update here) can do whatever it wants anyway, if you add a confirmation flag the trojan will simply pre-enable it. Even a checksum (including proper cryptographic ones!) won't save you.
I so miss things which are made to last. Perhaps this is not a product of rocket science, but the chair I'm sitting on right now is a pre-WW2 german-made one. A regular chair, not one of Aeron types or whatever. Why? Because no desk chair I ever bought lasted more than a year; the one I inherited from my grandparents which they in turn inherited from their ancestors is still working fine.
I fully agree with the article poster's sentiment for old German products. Bring such chairs to the orbit and the ISS will be able to continue forever.
and you wonder why we all choke with laughter when you expect to be considered journalists.
Have you ever looked at the quality of regular journalists? If kdawson/timothy make an error, it is quickly pointed out by the readers. Traditional journalists? Same or worse error rate, no corrections.
Please, don't use the words "Russians" and "peacekeepers" in the same sentence. I've got enough "peace doves" to draw in school while dad at constant military retraining kept learning the best ways to "defensively" attack Denmark.
And putting Soviet symbols anywhere above Nazi ones is bending the history. Per-year, Soviets were as bad or worse as Nazis, and we had occupying us (central and eastern Europe) for 50 years while Nazis did barely 5.
Slashdot Mirror
You see, somehow this isn't an issue on other OSes. Why? Because there's an unified update mechanism that can be used by any program.
In addition, most of available software is packaged in a big repository with security support, and if you use third-party repositories, they can use the mechanism as well. On Windows, though, every program has to implement its own update -- some do, like Firefox, Thunderbird, WinAmp or Java, but the vast majority lacks it. And even those few with an auto-update function have it in an inconsistent matter, requiring user intervention as well.
So your boss was right, Bill Gates' mother does have some guilt for the intrusion into your server.
Rest assured that any information that isn't negative to Microsoft will be posted last if at all.
Microsoft already does all they can to trumpet everything that goes to their favour, there's no need to repeat these pieces.
GL/PJ isn't exactly know for being an unbiased source - she will say/do anything to keep the hits/money coming in.
This is a war, and the other side fights hard for themselves. We're not supposed to help them.
Do you have a problem with Python too?
No, since Python is over an order of magnitude less bloated than C#. Being a bit slower at number crunching doesn't mean it can't be more efficient at doing other things.
And get rid of Do?
If you want program X, install it. No one says you should be unable to. Any package manager used today will automatically pull all the dependencies -- Mono in this case.
What I'm opposed to, is having this especially wasteful framework in the default install.
And Mono is in no way different from Wine. Heck, it is _less_ integrated -- with binfmt_misc you can have win32 .exes executed transparently, not so much with Mono -- if you look into /usr/bin/, you'll see wrappers that execute Mono on the program in question -- with an .exe extension!
Mono is nothing more than a .NET _emulator_ -- and an incomplete one, too.
Alas, Mono is still a part of the default Gnome distribution, just so they can have a note taking applet which takes 189MB memory (counting libraries used by it and no other process) and takes several seconds to start on beefy hardware while the C++ port of that very same code uses 5MB and starts near-instantly.
Even worse, there are folks pushing Banshee as the default music player so there's another dependency on Mono.
The sooner we get rid of Mono installed by default, the safer we'll be from this trap.
I'm sure your dad helped you get the autoexec.bat set up just right so it'd load your CD rom driver in and make sure high mem was available. Also, gotta make sure that the sound card starts up on the right IRQ, don't want to screw that one up.
It was an obstacle, but one that was a matter of a few single-line tricks. Now compare this to the Vista driver brouchacha that you cannot solve in any way, since neither Microsoft nor the hardware company is interesting in providing a working driver for your gear.
Or, use john -incremental -stdout. This will test reasonable names first, while not being restricted to RL names only.
It can be done better, too. ZFS' cow can be done only for entire filesystems, so you need to mount the snapshot. I have an idea for cloning directory hierarchies, this can be damn more powerful.
Of course, I don't have a crack team of coders and I'm not suicidal to start something as big as a filesystem as a personal toy project -- but it's something to think of.
Texting while driving is not merely using a cellphone. Try to drive and use a fiddly little keypad at the same time. It's not merely distraction, it's attempted murder.
Here in Poland, there's large popular support for a lifetime driving ban for anyone who causes an accident while DUI. I'd support the same for idiots texting behind the wheel.
What's the point to even consider VMware if you have a range of alternatives which do the same? For those who want everything to be nice and user-friendly, there's VirtualBox. For those who want emulating other architectures, qemu. For when you don't need to pretend that it's a stand-alone system, there's Xen and vserver.
Using proprietary software may be a reasonable choice if there are no alternatives with feature parity. For VMware, this is not the case.
And pushing Tomboy means it's nothing but a ploy to get Mono distributed. Choosing a minor app that takes 189 freaking MB of memory for nothing but displaying sticky notes on the screen is preposterous when you have similar programs which do the same in a few MBs. It's waste for your high-end desktop/laptop with 2-4GB RAM, it's a deal breaker for slimmer configurations.
Mono was a trap from the very beginning. Let's not let it drag us down.
Uhm, wrong. Sun's employees have specifically said they introduced the incompatibility on purpose. So it's not a problem with Linux, but a problem with Sun.
As GP said, stop trolling.
Yes, for example church-run (ie, most of them) orphanages in Ireland. All of physical abuse, sexual abuse and forced labor.
WHOA LOOK BEHIND YOU MAN!
Ok, I looked. And where's the three-headed monkey?
Except in China's case that 100% lip service, and actively working -- yes, they are, in the other direction.
But if you can create a crafted binary of your own, you can simply copy the app you want executed and chmod +x it. It will have the exact same capabilities as the other binary you can create. Thus, mapping ld.so doesn't give you anything and is not a vulnerability at all.
Well, an OS which can't handle upgrades without a clean install is pretty worthless. Have you tried something with a real packaging system?
I've heard that Red Hat and FreeBSD have sometimes troubles with upgrades as well, but as a long-time Debian user, I never noticed any large-scale troubles. Nothing is perfect, but issues are limited to single programs -- like, PostgreSQL failed in its upgrade from 8.1 to 8.3 on every single setup I managed so I had to do full dumps/restores. In general, system upgrades work fine -- there's a server which had potato->woody->sarge->lenny without a single breakage.
Dilbert quotes should be modded "Informative" instead. If you disagree, I bet you haven't started your first job yet...
Indeed, that money could be used for something of value instead. It's kind of the parable of broken glass.
If you have total control over the computer, you can change files of another program as you wish. It is generally impossible to install an extension without the user's interaction -- unless you mess with Firefox' internal structures, which is what Microsoft here does.
A question "Blah has been installed, do you want to enable it?" would be wrong in all legitimate cases, since the user already elected to install the thing. A trojan (Windows Update here) can do whatever it wants anyway, if you add a confirmation flag the trojan will simply pre-enable it. Even a checksum (including proper cryptographic ones!) won't save you.
I so miss things which are made to last. Perhaps this is not a product of rocket science, but the chair I'm sitting on right now is a pre-WW2 german-made one. A regular chair, not one of Aeron types or whatever. Why? Because no desk chair I ever bought lasted more than a year; the one I inherited from my grandparents which they in turn inherited from their ancestors is still working fine.
I fully agree with the article poster's sentiment for old German products. Bring such chairs to the orbit and the ISS will be able to continue forever.
and you wonder why we all choke with laughter when you expect to be considered journalists.
Have you ever looked at the quality of regular journalists? If kdawson/timothy make an error, it is quickly pointed out by the readers. Traditional journalists? Same or worse error rate, no corrections.
Comparing Soviet and Nazi occupations is just insane. It's way beyond bending of history.
I see you haven't lived in a country occupied by Soviets.
Please, don't use the words "Russians" and "peacekeepers" in the same sentence. I've got enough "peace doves" to draw in school while dad at constant military retraining kept learning the best ways to "defensively" attack Denmark.
And putting Soviet symbols anywhere above Nazi ones is bending the history. Per-year, Soviets were as bad or worse as Nazis, and we had occupying us (central and eastern Europe) for 50 years while Nazis did barely 5.
Perhaps it is time to abolish copyrights and patents, period.